


Charcoal

by elephant_eyelash



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, i haven't written fic in so long
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-25
Updated: 2018-09-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 10:59:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16094297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elephant_eyelash/pseuds/elephant_eyelash
Summary: All about winter and feeling the cold.





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The forest smelt of a thousand autumns, and the frost was just beginning to make the leaves snap beneath his feet. She walked silently beside him, but the forest floor did not seem to register her presence at all. She had always teased him for being big and clumsy, for taking up too much space; but he would simply reply that not everyone had the talent to become a ghost.

The cold up north makes his bones ache, no matter how many furs he wraps himself in. But he notes, too, how the cold pinks her cheeks and makes her seem more alive than ever, as if her blood was rejoicing and dancing underneath her skin. Yes, this was Stark blood, Arya’s blood, the blood of the North, that blood that coloured the vivid leaves of the Weirwood. It is not like the reds of the forge fire or of the terracotta air of King’s Landing, the only reds he knew before her. Never before, too, could he have imagined the dirty muddy grey of snow melting or crisp blue and white winds that now made up his life.

When they first came to the Godswood she had kissed the ground as if she could taste where her father’s footsteps had fallen, and she had asked Gendry to kiss the earth from her lips. Feel him here, she thought, feel me and my mother and my sister and my brothers and Old Nan and Hodor and everyone and everything that has made me. Gendry had understood, had his eyes fixed on her as he licked his lips and tasted limitless, unknown winters.

She had always known him, he thought. There was no great mystery to his life before her, despite his lineage – he was just one of the countless flea bitten Flea Bottom boys who spent their years baking in the sun who would sometimes wonder, absentmindedly, about the feel and look of snow. But he comes here and realises that winter is an ever-changing thing, a thing that is more than the cold mornings so bright they hurt your eyes or numb toes. It is a thing that seeps into your bones, instead, and colours everything you do with the promise of both life and death.

He wonders if the forge fire stays with him always, is in his blood more than any noble name, and helps to keep her warm. He wonders if she runs her hand over his chest and feels his heart beat and imagines a blackened piece of charcoal that is always burning. And as he holds her close sometimes the icy feel of her skin and the harsh jut of her bones makes him think of Valyrian steel, but he reminds himself that Valyrian steel becomes something stubbornly workable and pliable in the fire and that means she is his in a way that no one else can touch.

In the Weirwood he watches as she sits and prays. The Old Gods are not his (he has left all thoughts of Gods behind a long time ago), and winter will never entirely be his, either. But he does know how to watch, to keep silent and respectful and distant, and to keep them both warm as best he can with furs, with fires, with fingertips.


End file.
